Ironspark

by C. M. McGuire

  A wet wheeze shattered the sweet morning birdsong. I crept forward and there he was, leaning against a tree. He looked exactly like the sort of tall, handsome Fae princes I’d read about in my dad’s fairy-tale books. He had to be six feet tall and white as bone, but he was easily the prettiest thing I’d ever seen.

  His too-big, too-sweet eyes flicked up to me and he opened his mouth. A sickly sweet, metallic scent filled my nose as mauve blood flecked his lips. This was wrong. This wasn’t safe. I needed to run, tell my parents, lock the door, and hide in the nursery with the boys.

  “Do you need help?” I heard myself saying, my voice rolling with a Welsh lilt. I’d had one of those, once. When did it go away?

  The fairy-tale prince held out his hand to me. His nails had been filed to points, like cat claws. They didn’t have so much as a speck of dirt under them. I could never keep my nails so clean.

  “I can help you,” I said. “My mum’s got all sorts of things at home. Like a doctor. Only she’s not a doctor.”

  The prince didn’t say a word. His eyes widened as he reached just a little farther and snatched my hand in his. His grip tightened around mine. Too fast. Too painful. I yelped and tried to pull away. No. No, this wasn’t what had happened.

  “Stop!” I cried, squeezing my eyes until the pressure pulled away, leaving me gasping, shaking, waiting for it to come back.

  “Ssh, sweetheart.” A familiar voice. One that made me feel like sunlight and sundaes inside. I blinked as a face swam before mine. Not the prince. Dark curls and human eyes. My heart nearly stopped.

  “Mum.” I reached out to touch her cheek. Mum. She was here. She would help!

  Mum smiled, even as she pulled away before I could reach her. “Sweetheart,” she said again in that odd accent of hers—the one that wasn’t Welsh or English or Irish or anything I’d heard from anyone other than her. It was like a song that nobody else knew except for us. “I need you to keep a secret for me.”

  “I can.” I couldn’t. I knew better. This wasn’t what happened. This wasn’t how it went. But the prince was gone now, and I was safe. Everything would be fine.

  She reached into the front pocket of her crisp, button-up shirt and pulled out a brochure, tattered and folded up and read a thousand times already. My heart skipped at the sight of it. It was the ad for Penn State I’d picked up months ago. My chance for a life away from all of this.

  “I want you to go,” she said. “But you can’t do it if they won’t let you.”

  “Who won’t let me?” I asked. Soft lips pressed against my temple.

  “You can take care of it yourself,” she whispered. “You know how your father worries. And I worry over him.”

  “Me too.” I touched the edge of the brochure. The waxy paper had gone soft from too many readings. But it didn’t belong here. I was in the Before. This was in the After. I was forgetting something. Something important. “Mum, what happened to the Fae? The one from the woods?”

  She smiled at me. “You grew up so lovely, sweetheart.”

  “But Mum—”

  * * *

  THE SHRILL SCREECH of the alarm jerked me back into my room. I gasped, staring wide-eyed at the ceiling. The glued-on stars still glowed in the dim, pre-dawn light. My heart began to slow and, little by little, reality sank back onto me like a boulder. This was no longer my room. It all looked right, but this was no longer a world that offered safety from my childhood monsters. The Fae from last night was dead. The Fae prince from years ago was dead. There was no way he could have survived his wounds that day. But that didn’t mean the threat was gone.

  I slammed my hand on the alarm clock and kicked the covers off. Dark shapes scuttled along the walls, blending back into the shadows. A small, vulnerable part of me wanted to call for them to come back, but I swallowed the impulse. When Mum disappeared and the shadelings first revealed themselves to me, I’d wake up in the night screaming. Seeing those wide eyes staring at me in the dark? Well, they weren’t reassuring for a traumatized eight-year-old. Wet the bed for about six months. Now, though? They were my keepers. Or they were supposed to be. But they couldn’t exactly take on a court Fae, could they?

  I gritted my teeth and finally rolled out of bed with a hiss. My back was on fire. Perfect. I forced myself to my feet and shuffled into the biohazard that was the kids’ bathroom. I had to walk along a plush, mildewed layer of middle-school-boy clothing to get to the sink. I turned on the faucet and splashed some cold water on my face. The water washed away purple with Fae blood. My hands began to shake again. Frantically, I scrubbed at the bits of it that had flecked around the edge of the sink, leaving it cleaner than it had been in years.

  The reflection in the mirror made my heart stop. Amidst the spatters of snowy toothpaste residue, purplish-brown smears marred my cheeks. Shit! I’d fallen asleep with that stuff on my face. My stomach churned. I took a deep breath. One, two, three … I could handle this. I had to handle this.

  I wetted a washcloth and scrubbed at every inch of the grime, trying not to look in the mirror. Trying not to notice the color the washcloth turned. It was only when my skin began to burn that I stopped. My cheeks, my hands, everything the Fae’s blood had touched were now a bright, human pink. Rubbed nearly raw. I threw the now ruined cloth in the garbage and headed back to my room.

  It didn’t matter that my skin had been cleaned of that filth. It didn’t matter when I was dressed in fresh clothing for the day. The memory, the knowledge that it had found me, still clung to me like polluted air. Every twitch of my fingers summoned the feel of its claws on my throat. Every sound was a dull echo of the crunch of its skull under the rowan branch. My raw mood must have filled the room with some kind of greasy, anti-shadeling funk because not one of them appeared as I got dressed.

  My stomach lurched, but I swallowed it down. I needed help. More help than a shadeling could offer.

  I went for the loose floorboard under my bed and the precious shoebox within. Admittedly, it was probably a little paranoid of me to stash it the way I did. It wasn’t like I was hiding anything really dangerous. At least not to humans. But it was better than having to explain to my nosy brothers why I kept rowan twigs or Saint John’s wort in my bedroom.

  Tucked in the box were a plastic bowl, a bottle of honey, and a half-empty flask of holy water. Maybe it was a little sacrilegious to use holy water for something like this but, hey, whatever worked. I dumped the holy water in the bowl, added a few gloopy squeezes of honey … and there it got a little fuzzy. Technically I needed greens. But these things were really about intent and confidence and I didn’t feel like wasting any of my herbs. I dug through an old pair of jeans and found a box of Altoids. Minty. Mint came from a green plant. Ergo, an Altoid counted as a green. And Gwen had always liked mint, anyway.

  I dropped the Altoid in the mess, too. When it began to dissolve, I leaned over the bowl, close enough for my breath to touch the water, and whispered.

  “Gwen. I need your help.” Hopefully there was someone on the other end listening in. The Altoid cracked, and the honey-mint scent washed over my face, pushing back some of the pollution. I smiled. “Thank you. I’ll be by this afternoon. I need you to look into—”

  “Oh my God, Bryn, that looks gross!”

  I jerked back. Ash stood in the doorway, still in his pajamas, his nose wrinkled as he stared down at the bowl. My instincts screamed at me to shove everything back in the box, but that would pretty much convince him that I was up to something weird. So I put on my best Big Sister face and crossed my arms.

  “Ash, shouldn’t you be getting ready?”

  Ash’s dark brows furrowed. “Is that some kind of freaky diet?”

  “Get ready for school, you little Martian. I won’t ask again.”

  Ash shrugged and picked at a hole in his pajama bottoms. “I don’t feel like it. Jake’s going for me today. Not like the teachers can tell us apart.”

  Breathe in. One, two, three … “Then Jake will get in tr
ouble.”

  “Please. He’s got, like, a perfect record.”

  “What’s Jake got to say about that?”

  Ash pointed at the bowl. “Seriously, Bryn, are you going to drink that?”

  I like to think of myself as an honest person. When I told him I wouldn’t ask again, I didn’t. Kids needed consistency like that, and it felt good to fall back into an old routine. I rose slowly. Ash darted off. I followed. Like a good sister.

  It was only in the living room when I had Ash in a headlock that I saw Jake half dressed and inspecting his hairless chin in the glass of our old grandfather clock. His gaze drifted to me, then to Ash. With a huff, he rolled his eyes.

  “You’re an idiot, Ash.”

  Ash wriggled free from my arms and, for just a moment, looked like he wanted to shove me. Or Jake. Or both of us. But he adopted his new too-cool preteen attitude and sniffed.

  “You can’t blame me for trying.” He sauntered back to his room with all the swagger of a bowlegged poodle. I glared after him before turning to Jake.

  “You aren’t really trading places with him, Moonman?”

  Jake snorted and turned back to his search for the as-yet-uncharted chin hair. “Come on, Bryn. Like I’m going to give up my perfect attendance record so he can goof off.”

  Well, that was one less thing for me to worry about. I hoped Jake would never go full irritating preteen on me. I couldn’t handle Ash without him.

  “Good,” I said, grabbing a blanket from the couch and tossing it at him. “Now go put a shirt on.”

  Jake rolled his eyes. “Why don’t you tell me how to comb my hair, too, Miss Priss?” He shoved past me, but paused just in front of the hallway, brows furrowed. “Hey, how come you got in so late last night?”

  “Bible study,” I replied automatically.

  Jake stared at me for a long moment, enough to make my heart pick up the pace, before he huffed. “You’re such a liar. I’m gonna tell Dad you’ve been smoking in the graveyard.”

  “I haven’t.”

  “Right, and Ash and I have never done each other’s homework.”

  “Careful or I’m going to tell Dad you said that.”

  Jake held up his hands. “Whatever. Hey, I need to borrow your shampoo tonight. Ash used mine up.”

  “Ash has his own.”

  “Yeah, but he was too lazy to get more soap, so he used mine as body wash.”

  Little weirdo. I shrugged. “Whatever. Just don’t use it all up. I’m not going to the store until this weekend.”

  Jake half saluted and disappeared into his room.

  My stomach clenched and, just like that, whatever sense of normalcy I’d regained in the last ten minutes was gone. I counted to ten. When neither boy emerged, I rushed back to my room where … Yikes. I must have managed to spill half my stash when I went for the bowl and honey. Little bottles of Saint John’s wort, verbena, and dried daisies littered the floor, positively screaming, Look at me, I’m playing with fairies!

  I dumped the bowl out the window and stuffed everything back in the box, then the box back under the floorboard.

  When I finally re-emerged from my room, Dad sat hunched over the kitchen table, breathing in the java steam that curled up from his mug. He looked like a man just coming off of a long, difficult night, and his day hadn’t even begun. Once again, I was a little girl, staring up at her father, ready to ask him to make everything better. The words danced on the tip of my tongue.

  Dad, a Fae found us. It attacked me last night.

  But then there it was. A faint twitch at the corners of his crow’s-footed eyes, the sort he tried to control. The words died on my lips. I tried not to stare as I filled my own mug.

  “How are things?” I asked, my insides squirming. It was our code. “Things” meant “hallucinations.”

  Dad frowned into his coffee and took a sip. “Slept rough.”

  “Rough” meant the hallucinations were getting mean. Probably meant in the next few months he’d have another visit to the doctor to try out yet another medication and hope this one lasted longer. But they never did. This wasn’t your garden-variety schizophrenia. This was just a curse in a schizophrenia Halloween costume.

  After Mum went missing, Dad had tried to confront the Fae and demand that they give her back. Fae didn’t much like being told what to do, so when Dad returned, he was half starved and terrified, seeing Fae everywhere. The doctors called it the weirdest case they’d ever seen. I called it one more reason to hate the monsters that took Mum. Dad’s condition wasn’t natural, so there wasn’t much the doctors could do long-term. Lord, what would he do when I left for college? What would he do if he knew about what had happened last night? The things that had done this to him were back. And Dad couldn’t tell a real Fae from one of his hallucinations. He’d never even know if he were really in danger.

  Shit. What if them being here made him worse? Was a fairy curse worsened by proximity?

  Dad drained his mug and pushed himself up out of his chair, looking like a rusted tin man in a button-up shirt.

  “It might be another late night at the oil rig,” he grunted. “Make sure the boys eat something green.”

  I forced myself to smile, even though my stomach wanted to turn itself inside out. “Lime sherbet. Got it.”

  His lip twitched in not quite a smile, but it was okay. He’d be in a better mood after he was up and working. He dropped a kiss on my forehead, his large, callused hand resting on my shoulder. “Good girl. Have a good day.” And then he left, the door creaking shut behind him.

  A pair of luminous eyes peeked out from behind the toaster. So much for my anti-shadeling funk. The little creature crept forward, holding the chain with my nail on it at arm’s length.

  “We see what he’s seeing, Missy. The Unseelie nasties are getting uglier for him.”

  Well, hell. I crossed my arms. “Watch him today. And the boys. But—”

  “Keep secret. Yes, Missy.”

  Four

  After I walked the twin headaches to the junior high, I had to crowd into a musty auditorium with every jackass who’d ever called me “Crazy Man’s Kid” and every jackass who’d ever let them. On a logical level, I knew that school was not a waste of time, that high school would end, that sooner than later I’d be out of here. But some mornings, it was pretty hard not to stand up and walk out of the building.

  “I know many of you have heard of senioritis,” the vice principal said as she gestured at an eye-stabbingly bright PowerPoint. “But remember, colleges will still see your senior year GPA. Now, who here is thinking of applying to Penn State?”

  Hands shot up in the air. My stomach sank. There was Brooke Tanneman, who’d put white seed beads in my hair and told everybody I had lice last year. And Owen Cope, who’d spread the rumor that I was a devil worshipper back when we were both freshmen. And Dennis Holtzmann, who wasn’t awful, but who did spend all of freshman year walking around with a lacy bra outside of his shirts to protest … something. He’d never been clear what, exactly. These were the people trying to get into my college. So much for high school ending.

  “Good, good. Make sure you don’t let those GPAs slip; they could make the difference in your acceptance. Now, Penn State doesn’t have a minimum GPA requirement per se, but that doesn’t mean they don’t take it into account…”

  A few groans rose up in chorus across the auditorium, hopefully a sign that not all of them would be getting into my college after all. Near the front row, a boy shifted, resting his feet on the empty seat in front of him. Clearly not someone planning on Penn State. Who was that?

  I sat up straighter—quite a feat in those creaky old seats—and leaned forward. It wasn’t Dmitri or Lance or … or anyone I’d ever seen before, actually. Oh, crap. In a podunk little town like Easterton, it was kind of impossible not to know everyone. The timing couldn’t be coincidental.

  The strange boy leaned over and whispered something to Jasika Witters. I gripped the armrests on m
y seat. Jasika was good people. Possibly the nicest, most genuine person in this whole rotten school. She and her family lived on Postoak. She took care of her kid siblings like I did, and after they got a nasty case of redcaps in their master bathroom, she’d kept it secret. She’d been volunteering at the hospital since June, for goodness’ sake! How much more good-person could you get? And he was … what? Targeting her?

  The boy grinned at something Jasika said and glanced back. Right at me. My heart jumped into my throat and, for just a moment, I was eight years old staring at the Fae prince who’d destroyed my home. This guy wasn’t pale by a long shot, and he had dark hair and dark eyes and skin like an acorn, but something about those high cheekbones, the smooth skin, the wide, expressive mouth. Oh God. Ice flooded my veins.

  This was not a coincidence. A new student couldn’t just happen to show up right after a court Fae. One of them was in the school. Maybe even the same one from before. How? The whole building was made of reinforced steel. The catwalks alone stretched above us like a big, anti-fairy barrier. He ought to be shivering, panting, sweating just being near it. Were the more powerful court Fae somehow able to tolerate it?

  “… Okay, lots of you thinking about heading to Pittsburgh. So, let’s talk about those SAT scores,” the vice principal said.

  A band tightened around my chest. I sucked in a shallow breath as I slipped out of my seat, stumbling across the aisle. There were a lot of heys and watch its as I bumped into knees on the way out. The dark-eyed boy watched me, his brows furrowed. I clenched my hands to stop them from shaking. I wanted to scream. I wanted to puke.

  I slipped into the restroom, my heart racing. My control frayed at the edges like an old piece of rope. I had to compose myself. I had to think. What would Gooding say at a time like this? Probably something annoying about keeping calm. But he’d also tell me to figure out what I was up against.

  I took a deep breath, then another, and ran my fingers through my hair, mussing it into a heap. Usually, I could just look past a glamour. This one was different. It was too powerful, too human-looking. I needed a detection spell, then. Gooding would have a heart attack if he knew I was practicing this without him. Well, he’d never know.